John Bresee

Which is to say big and loud and fast and it’ll piss a lot of people off.

Ironically it’s those in the Netbook world who look shocked and say, “look how much more we give for half the price?” I’ve got bad news for Netbookians…your computers suck. They’re slow and painful and cramped. But oh yes, they were cheap. And we love cheap.

But the iPad isn’t a nicely done Netbook. It isn’t a Kindle with color. It’s not an iPhone that met a steam roller. It is the the next fom of computing and it’s beautiful. Yes, as always, it’s missing some things. But it’s not like a boat missing a motor. It’s more like, well, an iPhone that launched without cut and paste. We suffered along while we all worked to change the world.

The truth is we carry 100X the computer we need in our laptop most of the time. Buried in a slow loading inconvenient poorly designed behemoth. The iPad can accomplish 95% of what we need our laptops for. Oh, we won’t get rid of our laptops. That five percent is crucial. We will just add the fourth form of computing to our lives. And it will be beautiful and we will wonder in two years how we ever ordered off a menu that wasn’t pre-loaded in our iPad with our built in payment system.

The iPad is our wallet, portfolio, memory, communication, calendaring…well it’s our life. It’s just not our phone replacement. Our bags got lighter. We’ll take the laptops home one the weekends for heavy work.

Desktops? How cute…they’ll be good for towing behind cars or some such anti-world recreation. But the iPad will be our center.

And yes Android will follow and it will be good. It will be the Chevy 3/4 ton to the beautiful Pininfarina like lines of the iPod. Change is good and at first it will look effete and snobbish. But soon it will be real. And Microsoft and RIM and others will head for other shores, other businesses where they don’t have to compete with such smart people.. Most of our computing is simple and can even be fun. and it’s always better when it has location. The world continues to change whether we bought a two pound Droid with a worthless keyboard or not. The iPad makes me happy.

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Popularity: 21% [?]

I’m way off the back on this but I had to to jot it down. UStream launched their iPhone app recently and it’s simply one of the coolest and scariest pieces of technology I’ve ever seen. The app turns your iPhone into a realtime broadcast device. Your camera films and transmits whatever lies in front of it.

You have to see it function to feel the impact and realize how our lives have changed forever with this one application. Lets say you get pulled over and are concerned about how you are going to be treated. Flip on the app, spin the phone to face the side window and broadcast in real time your experience. Officer Friendly is, unbenknownst to him on live TV.

When you visit their site it is astonishing to see what streams are currently live. Endless litters of puppies under heat lamps…and and audience of 25 people watching them sleep. And the watchers happily chat with each other.

The scary side is that, even though the technology for video phones has existed since the 60s, but most people don’t want to be seen most of the time. Broadcasting our lives is uncomfortable and yet  you no longer get to decide whether somebody’s iPhone UStream camera feed is catching you at any given time and broadcasting it to the world. Giving up your privacy is scary. Giving individuals the power to broadcast is amazing. The world will never be the same. Rictus.

Oh, and the application is beautiful and works seamlessly, shouting out to (I can’t say the sill word tweeples) twitter, broadcasting your location and allowing you to chat with your audience at the same time. Truly brilliant development.

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Popularity: 78% [?]

Image doesn’t relate to the article…I just knew this guy back in the day and Zemanta thinks that “O’Reilly” and “Reilly” are somehow related in its really cool suggest an image tool. Oops. Whaddup Tony?

An O’Reilly reader asked the question, “should I dump my iPhone for an Android?” and it seems to be a question that is being asked more and more. The simple answer is no, unless you are a very early adopter with a massive tolerance for behaviors like your phone crashing. There is much criticism of AT&Ts network and the occasional dropped call. I, being a pathetic dork, carry both phones at the moment. I lose one or two calls a week due to AT&Ts shoddy network. And my iPhone crashes maybe once a month…maybe less. And that’s the thing with my phone, it’s like a light switch or a car, you want it to work every single time you turn the key or flip the switch.

A crashed OS and a bad network leave you with the same result…no phone. That’s not okay. AT&Ts network seems to be improving faster than the next version of the Droid will arrive.

And the Android crashes constantly. They use nice words like “forced restart of search application” or some such thing, but the truth is I have to sit and wait for my basically beta version phone to settle down and begin working again. I am confident that by version 3.0 things will be rock stable. But right now the Droid is the crash-o-matic.

The question is kind of a, “should I buy an Acura or a Maserati?” thing. One of them is cool and works beautifully all the time and the other one doesn’t look nearly as cool ’cause it’s in the shop several days a month. But Maserati’s are cool in their own way. If you want a second phone, Droid it up.

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Popularity: 85% [?]

At Backcountry.com the Gearheads have great latitude in resolving problems and doing whatever they can to make the customer happy. But this example is like no other I’ve ever seen. Follow the link to see the customers full post on her blog FoolsandSages.com. Here’s a small excerpt.

“After I placed my order, I sent their customer service folks a mail telling them how much we loved their site and asking for the shipping to be adjusted to reflect our original wish to combine shipping. I fully expected for them do graciously do so, but was absolutely not expecting the response I received:

‘Hi Andrea,

Thanks for contacting us at Steepandcheap.com.  We love you, too. We would marry you if you weren’t already married. And we weren’t a company, but rather a young shy boy lost in the throes of love, yea, a misty-eyed dreamer looking towards the future, still unscathed and unpolluted by the hardships of mid-adulthood. We would ask your housemaid to deliver white flowers to you, with an anonymous note that read “Heaven nor hell could provide me the joy and pain your approval or lack thereof might impose upon me.” Then, that very night at midnight we’d stand outside your window playing a love sonnet on the violin–a heartfelt ribbon of swaying notes and flittering string plucks. You could get out of bed and come to the balcony to listen. Instead of saying anything, you might drop a single white handkerchief slightly soaked with your tears.

But none of that could ever happen, so instead I just gave you a full refund on your shipping costs. I think it was like 8 bucks. Thanks for the love.’”

Wow…how unusual. Here’s her full post.  http://www.foolsandsages.com/2009/12/03/making-customer-service-fun-what-a-concept/

Popularity: 77% [?]

The iPhone is the most beautiful design and business exercise I’ve ever seen. I am happily humbled by Apple for their vision and incredible operational excellence. They saw and created a future of which I hadn’t even dreamed. The iPhone set me free.

And yet…so did Compuserve in its day. Compuserve and the Mosaic browser let me run about the web as fast as my 14.4k modem would allow, from one Star Trek fan site to another. And it became both my vocation and avocation. The iPhone, ten years after I first started working on the mobile web finally delivered on the promise of the richness of the web combined with dynamic community and localization. Thank you Apple.

When we take our first timid steps in a new technology we seek safety, familiarity and comfort; and the iPhone delivers. It lets us safely download apps that have been approved and search around the well lit corners of the nice part of Internet town…but it’s a bit like a cruise ship. You can’t ever really get in trouble. It’s kinda fun for a while, but the captain never invites you up to steer it or do donuts with the thing. And eventually you want to see the whole ocean.

And the Droid…well, it’s like Netscape 1.0. It crashes more than I did in high school, which is to say, a lot. And it lets you get the full unfettered internet, location and community access. Want to download an app that steals your private data…go ahead. Want to download an app that instantly violates federal wiretapping statutes…it’s one click. Seeking something really unsavory, it exists or is in development right now. I don’t even dare to imagine the things that are to come.

The world of Adult entertainment has often been the north star of the internet, showing us where web business is going. Take a look at the origins of most video streaming software or even internet traffic tracking companies.

And trust me, the iPhone’s bevy of bikini girl apps is really not going to satisfy the seemingly insatiable cultural appetite for prurient content. And in that part of the world the Droid wins hands down. The porn world has gotten a seat back in the game.

In the 90s Yahoo failed when it couldn’t keep up with the endless requests for sites to be added to its directory. It was excruciating to wait and see if your site would get accepted and practically business death if you weren’t. And Yahoo was unblinking as they ignored every request for information on how or whether you would get in. Even when they started charging $300 to get guaranteed placement it still didn’t really satisfy a webmasters desire for instant inclusion. Which is why DMOZ came about and eventually things like Wikipedia. The community does a better job policing massive amounts of content then a small group of censors with unclear by-rules.

And the four week wait for a developer to see if their efforts to fly in the Apple world just isn’t going to work. In the Web3.0 world we are being trained to expect real time in absolutely everything.

Android delivers the vicious one-two punch of instant inclusion and boundless content. And that is too mighty for Apple to beat. In the late 90s we ran as fast as we could from AOL into the arms of Earthlink and Comcast so that we could get the full web and not the pre-chewed variety. In 24 months or less the iPhone will be the choice of fussy Meerschaum pipe smoking ascot wearing professors and the rest of the world will be carrying Android 4.o phones that allow us full unfettered access to the world of content and applications.

It seems likely that a wikipedia of applications will come to fruition with a community of trusted testers and a standards body run by the community will come about. And when we see that BBB of mobile web, we will find trust. Until then, buyer beware.

But it’s going to be a cool winding road getting there…filled with missteps, crashes and eventually government intervention.

And Google will become a bevy of little Googlets, split up by the privacy fear mongers. This is the coolest movie I’ve ever not seen and I can’t wait.

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Popularity: 2% [?]

I borrowed $2,000 from my Mom for a white box 486/66 with four megs of memory and with it I started a newspaper, a journalism career and my first Web site. The white box was the theoretical bottom limit that could run Windows 3.1. And it could, sort of. It was all you could do, if you went to open a big program like notepad the whole system would crash with the screeching of failed temp storage on the itty-bitty hard-drive. Going from four megs to eight remains the greatest upgrade I’ve ever made. Suddenly I could compute…write articles, open up one of the thirty daily AOL or Compuserve disks I’d get. (76762@cserve.com or something like that).

I’m a bit geekier than average but still what I tote in my backpack isn’t wildly out of the ordinary:

Top Ten Items to Maintain Minimum Computing and Connectivity

1. Macbook Pr0 15.4″. Anything smaller is just annoying for spreadsheets and any larger and you can’t use it on an airplane. It’s simply the best laptop made for the hardcore business user. It’s intuitive, has long lasting batteries, huge piles of ram and every few months it just gets cooler. It’s the centerpiece of your geekdom.

2. Mac Air – Why  both? Well they’re for totally different purposes. The Air is a beautiful engineering excercise. It starts in a nanosecond, grabs a wireless connection before I can say Linksys and just generally works beautifully for 90% of my computing needs. It’s great to pass around the couch with a must-see You Tube clip and it for some reason is less offensive to bring to bed than than the MacBook Albatross. But it heats up fast in your lap and just doesn’t have enough of a graphic card. I love my Air so much that I’m not sure which one I’d grab in the event of a fire.

3. iPhone- Simply the best phone made today. The day I got my iPhone was as important as the day I got email. And it just keeps getting better. The camera is astonishing and the UI is an entire doctrine on simplicity as the soul of usability. I have nothing but the deepest respect for the product gurus who took us from the Motorola Rokr to the iPhone. That’s like going from the Pinto to the Bugatti Veyron. It simply can’t be done.

4. Kindle DX- I love the Kindle. I love it’s one way-ness. I love that it buries me by Whispernet under an avalanche of content and yet doesn’t really allow me to create a single email response. I am not looking for another computer, I’m looking for a tool that will help me organize and get through some small percentage of the many blogs and books I hope to read. Amazon has give me back the gift of reading.

5. Verizon MiFi 2200 – It’s a cellular modem/wireless hub the size of a credit card. It can support five concurrent connections, be they iPhone’s or laptops. It has a four hour battery built in and the speed is reasonable. It’s perfect in my RV and allows me to get rid of the relatively bad Autonet wireless hub.

6. Apple TV – I don’t know why it doesn’t get better reviews. Since I got this I don’t need cable any longer and with the MiFi it works in the car. No more scratched DVDs.

7. Motorola Droid – I hate that I love this phone. It’s a mishmash of usability errors combined with raw genius. It hints at the Jetson-like  future of mobile Internet.

8. Valentine One radar locator– I keep waiting for something better but it’s still the best thing to keep you on the right side of Johnny Law.

9. Oakley Thump sunglasses, V1. They’re so bad they’re good. It’s like the M-frame all over again. When you turn up the thump nobody bothers you. They look away painfully and make mullet jokes and that’s worth big money. Poison sounds especially good on those.

10. Party Blimp– Every remote control airplane I’ve ever flown has died in the first five minutes. The party blimp, filled with helium from WalMart, cruises slowly around the house safely bumping into everything and breaking nothing. It’s a remote controlled vehicle for someone with my limited skills.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Don’t get me wrong, slide rules are cool. We never would have gotten a man on the moon without them. I’m always envious of anyone who can run a slide rule or an abacus or even the classic Texas Instruments 12-C. Tools like these are amazing, deeply layered and powerful. They are often the engines that true scientists use to change our world, innovation by innovation.

As I slowly get to understand the Droid I realize that it is a far more layered and powerful machine than I realized at first glance. It is rife with problems but even more deeply loaded with innovation and promise.

The App market is the wild west, with every download a gamble; many of them crashing right out of the gate. And I wonder if I’m giving login information to hucksters. I just don’t have the faith in the Android marketplace that I do in Apple’s App store. But it’s cool.

There are physical aspects of the Droid that are wonderments, like the haptic touch screen keyboard. And there are physical aspects that are embarassingly bad, like the slide out QWERTY keyboard. It’s wholly unnecessary due to the excellent software.

The more I explore the more I learn to love the Droid. But it does not make me love my iPhone any less. The iPhone just works and it works beautifully and when it comes to communicating, be it text or voice, I want something straight forward that never crashes and has the usability of a simple light switch. In mobile simple is great. But the Droid, while overloaded with stuff, is a fascinating device.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Finally the US cellular world is settling down. It used to be a mishmash of companies and technologies; Analog, TDMA, CDMA, GSM, UMTS, EVDO, EDGE, GPRS, CDMA2000, etc. ad infinitum. But reall it was a silly mishmash of acronyms that brought no value to the consumer other than confusion.

Now we have settled into a simple world that seems to be summed up something like this:

1. AT&T – Its network sucks but they have the iPhone and it’s so much better than anything else that its customers are willing to suffer two dropped calls a week and the insufferable rudeness of not offering tethering.

2. Verizon – It begged borrowed and stole to create the largest network and it would have stomped or assimilated AT&T if it weren’t for those meddling kids at Apple. Its strategy appears to be to throw so many iPhone-like things at its customers that they will be tricked into trying something touch-screeny and that’ll lock ‘em down for another two years until it can build an actual user friendly mobile internet phone. Remember people, it’s not like thunder dome, “Break the deal, face the wheel.” All that happens if you abandon Verizon is usually a $100 charge that you can often talk AT&T into paying. Don’t be a droidiot.

2.1 Yes, I know about the Droids. I’ve got one sitting next to me but Verizon doesn’t have much coverage in Paia so I can’t use it. It’s got some cool features but overall it’s just a heavier dumber iPhone with a much worse app store. Version 3.0 of Android will be an iPhone beater if Apple sits still. And that’s what they’re known for, just kicking back in Cupertino and resting on their laurels.

3. Cingular – Really? Are they still around? Does anyone use them? is gettig a Cingular phone like getting a tattoo when you’re drunk? You wake up and realize you have a symbol for the devil on your ass, but damn, what are you gonna do. It’s gonna take two years of laser treatments to get it removed.

4. Sprint/Nextel – Push to talk? Wow, that still makes me laugh. I had push to  talk when I was 10. I used it a a communication technology that came right after my tin can and string communication phase. It was excellent in walkie talkies in my boy scout tent…on the floor of my bedroom for sleep overs. But it’s hardly the basis for a global communication strategy. I haven’t seen whether Sprint is growing or shrinking but I don’t know anybody with a Sprint phone. Do you?

5. Blackberry users– Okay, it’s not a wireless provider but it is cult like. Blackberry’s are like some disease that we know the cure for but it’s just going to take a while to stamp out. They spread like wildfire through the business world and ironically business thinkers are not real leading edge folks. It’s so painful when some Blackberry user shows me that he can too browse the web. And then on his itty bitty little screen he shows me Google with a proud expression like dog bringing you a bone when you get home from work. You pat them reassuringly and say, “good boy, yes, you’re on the mobile web, good boy.” And then you look away awkwardly.

6. Microsoft –Okay, we’ll save the hardware vendors for another post but simply: BAHAHAHAAHAHAHAA!

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Popularity: unranked [?]

Wow. When Goliath finally decides to step up and kill David you expect some fireworks. I mean Motorola isn’t exactly new at cell phones. They practically invented the Bat phone and those huge things that Crocket and Tubbs lugged around on ‘Vice. So when Google and Verizon and Motorola teamed up for the wireless Malachi Crunch I expected something really cool. Unfortunately the first go round with it suggests that it kinda sucks.

I remember my two year-old son was able to operate my iPhone and unlock it on his own. He was quickly navigating through the interface without any help. I was able to make the iPhone work without resorting to a manual. I was annoyed by the touch screen typing but I got used to it in a few weeks. Already I’m jonesing for my touch screen QWERTY. The Droid is confusing and awkward and lacks, well, UI. As the CTO at my company often says, “soft is hard”. And boy the User Interface just plain stumps someone with my room temperature IQ.

The hardware is okay. The flash on the camera is nice and the speaker is better. There’s a nice use of vibration/haptics in the interface that  I like. And it’s got a nice heft to it so when I finally get annoyed enough it’ll go clear through the window as opposed to bouncing off as the iPhone might.

I will say it’s better. The iPhone has forced the rest of the world to raise the level of their game. But all you Verizonites who can’t seem to understand that it’s only about $100 to break your contract will be happier on the Droid than on the DOS like Blackberry. But it’s no iPhone. The droid is the Corvette of phones…which is nice if you’re into that kind of thing.

The game isn’t over.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Ten years late mCommerce has arrived. Due to our convoluted quilt of 12 wireless technologies like the laughably bad TDMA (AT&Ts previous technology that could manage only eight calls per cell) we find ourselves arriving a decead after iMode revolutionized Japanese pop culture.

Apple’s iPhone strategy has been the most beautiful business ramp in the history of technology. The OS is, despite some minor flaws, excellent. A year ago it became the one material possession I would save with me if there was a fire (pardon the duh factor of grabbing a phone). In the past my laptop was my most vital possession and yet quickly my iPhone has supplanted. Yet convergence is just as far in the distance as it ever was. I use my laptop just as many hours a day…it’s just the the iPhone has eaten up all the space that comes between. Even a pause in conversation is enough to have me idly unlocking the phone, considering a spin through the app store.  Divergence is alive and well as it always has been.

Much of the business world is still grappling with what kind of opportunity the iPhone really represents. Often the thinking goes that mCommerce should be like the Tommy Hilfiger web model. I believe that is the wrong tack, taking traditional eCommerce and just shrinking it to a smaller form factor.

What needs to exist is the notion mobile is leading us to a new model for computing that I’ll call for the moment, Better than Web.

Better Than Web is, well, just like it sounds. eTailing always runs a few years behind the content revolution and generally  also just doesn’t do things as beautifully. There isn’t an ecommerce site in the world that has anything like Facebook’s beautiful UI and phenomenally layered business logic. I dream of an eTailer that hits even 70 percent of the Facebook mark.

And in the world of Apps the gap between the A players and the eTailers is larger. I have yet to se

e an etail example using GPS, shared browsing, haptic interface, audio, accelerometer and more. With GPS, turn by turn navigation and some simple work Walmart could have every one of their store’s guide you through a real map your current stadium like store. Add a list function and it could walk you to each product you need while offering you coupons on nearby or similar items. Average cart could climb and time in store could go down. Need a clerk. Hit the big panic button and scan the bar code and have an instant call back…from the call center in Mumbai.

And for us rare pureplays the world just gets rosier. Show only reviews from my state, current location, in the last fifteen minutes, from my friends, etc. No longer need a person in Naples Florida be greeted by puffy down coats on the homepage. We could actually personalize. If it’s a ski site like ours and we’re able to track vertical skied in one day then we would know much better what skis to recommend.

Simply put, in eTailing your retail App better not be a slimmed down dimmer retail store with itty pictures that works in conjunction with your web site. It instead needs to be the next generation or etailing offer much much more. The move to dynamic localized and personalized content just moved up a few years. Ebay is averaging $89.95 per download in revenue and we haven’t even hit the holidays. Mobile is the future of etailing, duh. And Better Than Web is the future of mobile.

Popularity: unranked [?]

If you don’t have an iPhone then you are one of the teeming masses of the world that has missed yet another crucial juncture in technology. I don’t want to love Apple. They’re smarmy and pretentious in an icky way. Were they on the island in Lord of the Flies they would have been Piggy and that’s no way to get ahead in a uptight society. But the truth of the matter is that Piggy made fire with his glasses. He was damned handy to  have around.

And in this world Apple is quite simply the best product company on the planet. They make beautiful brilliant products. Okay, they kinda suck at customer service and their web site is oh-so hip circa 2005. But when it comes to stamping out a product you can hold in your hand it dwarfs all others…whatever the category. *For all you sad wannabes toting your BoysenBerry Crescendo and saying, “it has a touch screen too”, please, please just shut up and click away on your miniscule QWERTY keyboard. I know, it costs you $150 to get out of your contract…yawn again. It’s worth $150 to stop the bleeding and join the world. Simply put Apple is five years ahead of the nearest competitor in wireless. It’s like Icarus boasting about having Greek bees wax with a one degree higher melting point while Daedalus is kicking it in a G5.

Rather than get your dander up and say things like, “there are 11,000 apps in the Android app store”. Yawn. Apple has sold or given over 2 billion apps. The competition is laughable. It’s like Manchester United taking on my sons team, the Condors. There is no competition in wireless smart phones. It may burst to life again in a couple of years, but I haven’t seen signs of it.

And it’s the App store where the love resides. It’s so good that I check it at least daily. And when I find a new app; in whatever category; my life becomes instantly better in that way.

The momentum behind apple is enormous. They have created a better UI, a better way to navigate the web, a mobile eco-system that works and ultimately the one portable computer that we must all own.

I had a Blackberry for quite a while. And it had as much in common with Apple’s communication platform as my first tin can and string phone. Good luck wireless world. You’re going to suffer for a long while.

*Apple, you suck at mice and that is inexcusable. The Apple TV is cool, but not cool enought to bear  your name.

Popularity: unranked [?]